Midnight Falls: A Thrilling Retelling of Cinderella (35 page)

“What happened?” Marion asked, stepping toward Ella.

“Why are you home so soon?” Frome inquired over Marion.

Ella had so much to tell them, but the idea of doing it right then and there seemed unbearable to her. Still, she had to try.

“The ball ended abruptly.” Ella stated.

“Why?” asked Marguerite.

“Because King William is dead.”

Both Marion and Marguerite gasped. Frome demonstrated sincere sorrow as, even in his advanced years, he had always admired King William. “I can’t believe it,” he said aloud.

“What does this mean for Prince Leopold?” Marguerite asked.

“He will be our new king,” Ella said unemotionally.

“What do you mean he
will
be our king?” Louis said, chiming into the dialogue. “Isn’t he the king now that his father is dead?”

“No,” declared Frome, “it is law that mourning of the fallen monarch halt all activity until the day of his death is concluded. That includes the swearing in of a new king. Prince Leopold is not the king until midnight.”

“So, what happens until then?” Marguerite asked.

“I don’t know,” Ella declared, making her way toward the front door of her home, “but I am going to sleep.”

She knew it was unfair to make all of her loving friends wait to hear the details of what was supposed to be the most magical of all nights. But Ella would have to bear that shame. She could force her legs to hold up her body and her heavy heart no longer.

“Ella wait!” Marion said as Ella pulled the large oak door open. “What happened with Gabriel?”

Ella had to say something, just a few words to acquiesce their quarries. They deserved that much at least.

“He’s gone.”

Chapter Thirty

Thurlow was in a state of delirium. He had never had to take in so very much to his cognition at one time. It was tantalizingly euphoric to have so much to look forward to. In his entire life he had never, until that very night, known what it was like to experience pure unadulterated joy. He’d been born into poverty, raised as an orphan by men and women who believed so piously that one’s mortal situation had been predicated upon their worthiness in some kind of heavenly pre-existence. Therefore, Thurlow had been born to be totaled in the mass of criminals, miscreants and every other deviant that must have blasphemed against God in the most unforgivable way. As a grown man, Thurlow had grown wise to the delusions of those who believed their good fortunes had been well earned; but it had taken a tremendous amount of perseverance to come to that truth. He was strong where so many couldn’t be. To a young child, such education could very well bring about the death of the soul.

There were only three more hours to go. Leopold foolishly believed he would be meeting his future queen, Ella, at midnight. It made Thurlow laugh out loud. He was alone in a dimly lit vacant foyer, an
oriel
, watching through the fenestra all the commotion still resonating throughout Gwent. He could laugh all he wanted. No one would hear him.

“Is something funny?”

Thurlow jumped and looked toward the female voice. He did not startle easily and it made him rather temperamental. The woman, whomever she was, remained shrouded in shadow.

“Who are you?” Thurlow demanded. “The castle is to be vacated. I can have you arrested for being here.”

The woman did not speak, but stepped into the hazy light of the candles and revealed herself to Thurlow. He was shocked. He knew the woman, but could never have guessed why in the world she was standing before him.

“What are
you
doing here?” he asked, curtness still abounding in his voice.

Isolda held herself confidently, surely. She could not recall a time when she felt quite so compelled in her actions. It was a pleasurable sensation for her: knowing she held all the cards.

“I am here to speak with you, Captain Thurlow,” Isolda revealed.

“Well, tonight is not a good night for a chat, your ladyship. After all, our beloved king has died.”

“Yes, yes. Tragic news that was. But I bring with me information that might assuage your deepest grievances. That, or provoke them.”

Thurlow stepped toward Isolda, cautiously. He remained silent.

“I have known for sometime your obsession with my niece, Ella Delaquix,” said Isolda. “It may interest you to know that not only does she not return your favor, she has found it in another man.”

“This is what you offer me, Baroness?” Thurlow shook his head as he chuckled. “You think I would watch your niece for two long years like a falcon and not know she has waltzed into Prince Leopold’s line of sight? Please. Don’t insult me.”

Isolda laughed, almost as loudly as Thurlow had only moments before. “You think she gives a hoot about Prince Leopold?” she said amusedly. “Now you insult yourself, Captain. Ella is no more interested in being a princess than she is in being a cat.”

“What are you talking about?” Thurlow implored, his brow beginning to perspire.

“I will tell you. But I require something in return first.”

“You are trying my patience, woman.”

“Well, we women are quite good at that. Now, as you may or may not remember, I have a daughter who is the same age as Ella. She was here with me tonight. You see to it that she gets her allotted time with Prince Leopold this very night and you will have more gossip than you could chew in a week.”

“Gossip? I could have you arrested, Baroness. How is that for gossip?”

“Not bad. But seeing as I have had my fair share of intolerable men for the evening, I would rather bypass your burly show of power and just get down to what it is that you are itching to know.”

Thurlow gazed at the woman he’d always known as Ella’s one, and only, aunt. She was a formidable human being. He liked her.

“Very well,” Thurlow relented, moving closer to Isolda as he spoke, “listen carefully. Tonight at midnight, Leopold will be alone in the northern dormitory. There will be privacy and he will be expecting…a woman.”

“What woman?”

“Whom do you think, Baroness?”

Isolda contemplated his rhetoric and her answer came rapidly. She cringed in revulsion. Why was it so expected that Prince Leopold would fancy
her
? “Ella?”

“None other. But she does not know yet that Leopold summoned her. So let’s spread this web a little farther shall we? Go to Ella; convince her to come here at midnight to see Leopold but tell her he will be waiting in the eastern dormitory of the castle. Send your daughter as well, separately. I will see to it that Ella is … preoccupied. Your daughter will take her place and meet with His Highness the prince. The rest will be up to her.”

“Won’t Leopold be angry?”

“I can’t solve every one of your meager problems, Baroness. Besides, if I am correct about just who your daughter is—bright yellow dress, right?—then he will not be angry for long. She is quite stunning. Several of my men were carrying on about her earlier tonight. Now just listen. Instruct your daughter to make use of her god-given attractiveness and Leopold will undoubtedly rise to the occasion. He’s always been quite malleable to pretty women.”

Isolda could not help but be flattered on Aislinn’s behalf. But even though she knew as well as anyone just how bewitching her daughter was, she was still wary of tricking Leopold; a man who was, for all intents and purposes, the acting king of Gwent and who had just lost his father as well. Did she dare trust Thurlow?

“Very well,” Isolda conceded, uneasy with the nuances of espionage.

“Now tell me what I am ‘
itching to know’
,” Thurlow petitioned, wondering if her sacred information was worth so much trouble. Then he reminded himself how little trouble it would actually be—that by midnight, Leopold would be …
unable
to meet anyone in private. In many ways, Thurlow was just humoring the baroness. It seemed a prudent way to make the clock tick faster.

“Ella,” Isolda declared, “is in love not with the prince, but another man; a man that you believe to be the Duke of Ebersol.”

“
The Duke
? She is in love with her uncle?!”

“He is not her uncle! He is an imposter. He is conspiring with Ella something treacherous and, seeing as he escorted her here tonight, I am guessing that treachery has something to do with this royal ball.”

Thurlow was struggling to draw breath. Perhaps it was a good thing that he was unable to inhale excessive amounts of oxygen, for if the embers of his slumbering energy were fanned in any way, he might thrash the entire room and destroy his entire itinerary for that evening just so he could find the duke, the imposter, and eviscerate him.

“How did you come to know this, Baroness?” Thurlow inquired, trying not to let his requests sound too exerted.

“I saw them with my very eyes, Captain Thurlow,” Isolda replied. “Tonight, after the announcement about King William’s passing. They were alone on the terrace. I saw it.”

“What did you see? Tell me exactly.”

“They were fighting. But first they—they—“

“What?”

“They kissed. Quite passionately. Then Ella was crying and he turned his back to her. Then she walked away.”

“Did you hear anything?” Thurlow demanded vehemently, no longer concerned with the illusion of restraint.

“Not a great deal. But I did hear Ella say his name several times.”

“Tell me!”

“Gabriel. She called him Gabriel. Does that name mean anything to you?”

Gabriel.

Thurlow’s eyes narrowed as he tried to dissect what Isolda was telling him. He had heard the name Gabriel before. But where? Earlier, the man he believed to be Peter Summerly had cajoled him and he was reminded of a face that evaded him. Now, he learned Peter Summerly was a fraud named Gabriel and once again the face eluded him. It induced a fury unlike anything Thurlow had ever experienced. It was like his own mind was mocking him. Suddenly, three hours seemed so little time to rummage through his memory with a pin and pluck away at mental images that may or may not pertain to his current conjuncture. And Isolda was now sucking up more of those valuable seconds than he could permit any longer.

“No, it does not, Baroness,” he lied, desperate to dissuade her from inquiring any further. That was, unless, she could shed some much needed light to his blindness. “Does the name mean anything to
you
?”

Isolda ruminated on the question. The captain was trying so hard to feign composure during their discourse but his upper lip was perspiring and his eyes were almost bloodshot. Isolda chuckled in silence.

He must think me quite the dullard
, she thought. Still, Isolda was able to offer nothing to illuminate his quandary. “I have never heard the name before,” she confessed though she was not willing to surrender completely without utilizing her aptness for bluffing, “but bear in mind that only a month ago, Gabriel was not in Ella’s life at all. I know it. Before she met him, all that interested Ella was her misfit friends in Kersley.”

Kersley!

Thurlow almost leapt at Isolda and gripped her arms in his hands like a vice.

“Did you say Kersley?” he asked, his eyes so possessed that Isolda feared she might have been too blasé with a man so prone to aggression, and so very powerful.

“Yes,” she replied, struggling pull away. She did not have to try hard. Thurlow almost threw her out of his grasp as he sprung for the exit. He said nothing; just vanished. Isolda was left alone to deliberate on what had just transpired. Some bluff! It had all but incinerated the man to learn that Ella had trafficked with the plebeian peasants of Kersley. Why did such a revelation enrage him so? Isolda was Ella’s aunt, her family, and stood to withstand more shame than Captain Thurlow by her niece’s trifling with such people.

But Isolda did not dwell in her stupor for long. She had far more pressing matters to consider. Aislinn was most certainly already home at that point. Three hours was not a tremendous surplus of time to travel home, find her daughter and explain to her what would be going down at midnight, and return to the castle ever ready to claim what very well should have been their birthright.

Captain Thurlow paced down the darkened hallways towards the private chamber deep within the castle keep sanctioned for the Hussars’ secret meetings. Each of his strides was deeper than the last and each new breath saturated with the weight of elusive memories.

Gabriel. Kersley.

Thurlow had been thrust into the vault of misplaced recollections when Isolda had mentioned Kersley. Images of a dead body, a man tall and unrecognizable, interlaced with the echoes from the lair, the abysmal prison that had almost been abandoned until the Hussars’ raid on none other than Kersley several days before. Thurlow heard the murmurs in his mind; murmurs from what should have been a dead man.

You are a murderer. As God is my witness, I will…

Who was he? Who was the man that had donned the title of a duke and called himself Peter, the maternal uncle to the woman that Thurlow had lusted after for the last two years?

As God is my witness, I will make you pay for…

Thurlow’s step was again propelled by the memory of a convict, battered and broken, his hair black and knotted, his face adorned with stubble and numerous cuts and bruises. The convict was condemned to die. He was being beaten, however, not for punishment. He was being “persuaded” to make a statement. A confession for some crime to which he swore he was not guilty. Thurlow remembered the strength of the prisoner; that his declaration of innocence was not mired in weeping or pleas for mercy, even though he was being struck continuously with an iron bar. Instead, Thurlow was quite impressed by the prisoner. He was brave. Just like…